More often than not, oral data differ from written data both from a frequential and distributional point of view. They lead to a sharpening of the description as they supply us with construction characteristics or contexts that do not exist in writing.Dislocations and the form 'il y a', known to be lavishly used in the oral language, provide us with often predictable examples regarding their distributional characteristics as well as their function in textual dynamics.Although 'certains' as a subject is not much used in spoken language, its offers a variety of distribution facts which are also clearly divided and actually related to the kind of observed corpus.The following article therefore aims at presenting us with three case studies that are representative of the relationship between data and analysis.

The description of intonation is particularly difficult for spontaneous speech, due to the extreme variability of data. This forced many phoneticians to describe intonation through the use of sophisticated statistic tools, whereas phonologists convinced themselves to use reductive transcription tools such as ToBI. We show here that intonation models built for read speech data can be used successfully for the analysis of spontaneous speech, which after all uses the same linguistic code as read speech production. The experimental data presented illustrate the diversity of speaker strategies to orally structure their sentences, still using the same prosodic rules specific to French as in read speech conditions.

Conference interpreting is a particular form of orality. Placed at the core of communication between a speaker and his/her audience, the interpreter is, at the same time, text producer and receiver. In his/her function as linguistic and, above all, cultural mediator, the interpreter produces an interpreted speech on the basis of an original speech ; hence the subordinate nature of his/her role. The orality of the source text (original speech) and of the target text (interpreted speech) has been, to this day, the Cinderella of interpreting studies. In terms of both quantity and quality, results obtained so far do not yet enable us either to provide a comprehensive description of orality in interpreting, or to compare and contrast it with other forms of oral language.